1265: Warmness

It is extremely hot here at the moment. Judging by Twitter this evening, this particular climatic condition is not isolated solely to Southampton, but this doesn't make me feel that much better.

I'm currently writing this post on my phone because for some frustrating reason our Internet has gone down. I've rebooted the router several times and it's still not playing with us. I'm not entirely sure why I'm telling you this, but writing a post on my phone like this tends to put me in "stream of consciousness" mode more than anything else. (The WordPress app still doesn't have a word count facility, either, so I just keep banging on until it "feels" about the right length.)

Family Guy is currently on BBC3. I do quite like Family Guy, but the frustrating way about its being broadcast on BBC3 is that whatever dribbling idiot is in charge of the scheduling for that otherwise atrocious station clearly has no idea how to broadcast something in chronological order and without repeating the same episode at least twice a week, sometimes more. These are all repeats anyway, so there's really no need for this repetition, particularly when iPlayer is a thing that exists.

I say I quite like Family Guy, but there is one exception: that fucking episode with Surfin' Bird. It was doubly annoying when it was on recently, because, as mentioned above, it was on twice in one week. I wasn't even watching it and it irritated me. I know that episode is supposed to be irritating, but it just goes much too far in its irritation factor.

Anyway, my concentration is shot right now due to the combination of typing this on my phone, Family Guy on the TV, Andie playing Animal Crossing next to me and the rats playing in their cage at the end of the bed. (We brought them into the bedroom so they could have some company, and also because it's slightly cooler in here; they don't seem to like the heat all that much!)

As such, I'm going to call that a night there. Hopefully our Internetz will be back tomorrow, which will allow me to type something on a proper computer rather than using just my thumbs!

1264: Smash the World's Shell

I finished watching Revolutionary Girl Utena at last today.

Honestly, I'm really not sure what to make of it. I don't mean I didn't like it — I did — but rather, I feel like I've woken up from a dream and don't really know how to parse what I watched.

As anyone who has watched Utena will tell you, of course, this is part of the attraction of the show. It is a show that prides itself in its surrealism, symbolism and deeply metaphorical nature. There's a sense throughout that nothing is quite as it seems, and that you probably shouldn't be taking some of the things that happen over the course of the 39 episodes too literally — not least because none of the characters appear to. They seem to shake off the frankly utterly baffling things going on with alarming rapidity, which leads you as the viewer to question whether those things were really happening at all, or whether they were merely representative of something else.

One of the best yet most frustrating things about Utena is that there are no definitive answers, though. The show's creator, I'm told, enjoys taunting fans and deliberately misleading them, and pointedly won't say what the definitive explanation for it all is. This might be because there isn't a definitive explanation for it all; or it might simply be an attempt to get people to figure it out for themselves, come to their own conclusions and take whatever they want from the show as a whole.

In some respects, the whole thing reminded me somewhat of Silent Hill, of all things. Obviously the two series are very different from one another despite having a common heritage — Silent Hill is Japanese psychological horror, while Utena is colourful Japanese anime — but both actually have a surprising amount in common, not least of which is the fact that both are pretty open to a hefty degree of interpretation.

Both are riddled with psychosexual imagery, too. Neither are outright explicit with it — though Silent Hill 2 does feature a scene where Pyramid Head, that game's iconic recurring monster, is raping a tailor's mannequin — but both feature a very strong sense that sex and sexuality are a core theme. In Silent Hill's case — particularly Silent Hill 2 — there's a sense of guilt and shame attached to sexual desires for a variety of reasons; Utena, meanwhile, is rife with both phallic and… uh… whatever the word for the vaginal equivalent of phallic is… imagery. (Just "vaginal", I guess, but that doesn't seem to fit quite right.) There's a strong sense of Utena's characters reaching sexual maturity and coming to terms with that in different ways, much as James had to come to terms with aspects of his own sexual desires in Silent Hill 2.

Frankly, I'm not sure I'm intelligent enough to be able to do a particularly deep reading of Revolutionary Girl Utena without spending a significant amount of time researching, but suffice to say I enjoyed it and very much respected what it was doing, even if I didn't always understand it fully. As I say, though, that was probably sort of the point all along.

If you're curious, I'll share a super-interesting essay I read earlier immediately after finishing the series. It doesn't claim to be a definitive interpretation of the show, but it's certainly a plausible reading of it, and definite food for thought. Check it out here.

1263: Lifestream

Final Fantasy VII came out on Steam today, a full year after its "new" PC port hit Square Enix's store with new achievements, cloud saves and an option to make the whole thing insultingly easy for yourself.

Final Fantasy VII holds a very special place in my heart for a variety of reasons, the main one being that it was the first ever JRPG I played and understood.

I'd played role-playing games beforehand, largely on home computers, but didn't really understand the concept. I'd tried games like Temple of Apshai, Alternate Reality and Origin's dreadful Times of Lore, but didn't really get my head around the concept of numbers affecting your performance in the game. When I first started playing Final Fantasy VII, I still didn't quite get it, but all the core concepts gradually started to come to me: turn-based combat, abstract representations of game elements, characters distinguishing themselves with unique special abilities.

It wasn't the mechanics that attracted me to Final Fantasy VII, though; it was the story. I'd never experienced a video game with a story 1) that long and 2) that emotionally engaging. Of course, both Final Fantasy VII's length and emotional engagement value are both somewhat laughable today, but remember, this is 1997 we're talking about here, and also I had never played a previous installment in the Final Fantasy series. Largely because quite a few of them never made it to Europe.

I'll tell you the one reason I picked up Final Fantasy VII in the first place: my brother explaining to me that it was the first video game he knew of that had made people cry. I don't remember if he was one of them or not, but certainly someone he associated with had wept openly at That One Scene That Everyone Knows by Now But Which I Won't Spoil on the Off-Chance You Still Haven't Played FFVII and Were Thinking About Picking it Up on Steam.

That idea was fascinating to me. Up until that point, computer and video games had been an important form of entertainment in my life, but very few had engaged my emotions in such a manner as to have a physical effect. In fact, none had. There had been story-based games, sure, and there were a number of these which contained characters I thought rather fondly of — I still fancy Sophia Hapgood from Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis — but none which had really made me feel something.

By the time I reached the end of disc 1 on Final Fantasy VII, I was thoroughly invested in the story and characters. By the time that disc actually ended — you know the bit I'm talking about — I had to put the controller down, sit back and dry my eyes. It felt a bit odd tearing up at "just a game", but it marked the beginning of my lifelong fascination with interactive storytelling — particularly those works that grab you by the heartstrings and tug, tug, tug.

I don't know yet if I'll pick up Final Fantasy VII on Steam. I have a perfectly serviceable physical copy on PS1, after all, and aside from the hi-res graphics on the PC version (which aren't all that great) the PS1 version is The Way to Play. But that game will always have a very special place in my heart. It may not be the best entry in the Final Fantasy series; it may not be my favourite game of all time any longer, but it will always be special.

1262: Review of Reviews

I've been pondering an interesting question with regard to reviews — primarily in the video games medium, but I imagine it also applies to other media too.

That question is the one of who you are writing a review for.

When it comes to an obviously mainstream piece of entertainment, it's obvious: the review is for everyone, or at the very least the significant majority of people who enjoy mainstream entertainment. When a new Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed hits the market, that review is aimed at everyone because the game is aimed at everyone. Theoretically, anyway — there's plenty of room for debate there, but that's something for another day.

But let's take something that is obviously more niche interest; something that will obviously only appeal to a very specific set of people. Something that will appeal very strongly to that specific set of people, but which anyone from outside that group of people will not appreciate, for whatever reason. I'm hesitant to give specific examples because I've just started playing a game for review that very much falls into this category, and I will likely address this point in said review.

Here's how I feel I should probably approach this situation, though: I would preface the review with a preamble that explains the things people from outside its target audience may appreciate and/or dislike, and the fact that the remainder of the review is primarily intended for people who do fall into the game/movie/book/whatever's target audience. This step is unnecessary if you're writing the review on a site that is specifically aimed at the media's target audience, since it's a given; if, however, you're writing for a more "general audience" site, it's worth noting, I feel.

The reason I feel it's worth making this distinction is because of the subjective nature of opinions, and the fact that a "general audience" isn't a homogenous bunch of people. Rather, said general audience can be subdivided into various smaller groups, each of which has their own interests. Should something be panned just because it's not universally appealing? Of course it shouldn't — unless it's objectively actually broken in some way, it deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt and looked at through the eyes of someone who it's theoretically "for". It's not particularly fair, otherwise; you wouldn't review a saxophone case and give it one star for your clarinet not fitting in it, for example. Not precisely the same thing, I know; perhaps a more apt comparison would be a classical music magazine giving a dubstep album a low mark for not being classical enough.

This highlights a peculiarity of the games press, though: we're short on "specialist" outlets. We may have specialist writers working on a single outlet, of course, but with the exception of a few, mostly enthusiast-driven rather than commercial sites, however, a significant proportion of game sites try and cover as much of "everything" as possible. This probably does a lot of games a disservice, to be perfectly honest: games have a perceived level of "importance" that is usually directly proportional to their marketing budget and/or likely sales figures. This can, in some cases, lead to games of "lesser" importance not being given the time and attention they deserve; the most prominent example I can think of this happening is Cavia's Nier, which received middling-to-low review scores from pretty much every big outlet around, but which is absolutely beloved by people who have played it through from start to finish and engaged with it.

Why the discrepancy? Reviewers are busy; they might not have the time to delve into all of Nier's sidequests and look at it from the perspective of someone who has the luxury of time to immerse themselves in the world and story. It's a simplistic explanation, but it's entirely plausible; in the rush to get that Nier review done before whatever big triple-A title hit that week, it's entirely believable that some reviewers may not have given it the time and attention it deserved.

I understand. It sucks, but I understand.

Hopefully over at USgamer, since our focus is more on editorial pieces than traditional reviews/previews and the like, we can give these "lesser" games an appropriate degree of care, and subject them to an appropriate degree of criticism rather than making snap judgements. And, to me anyway, that criticism should take into account the game's target audience; if it's a game obviously designed for a very specific group of people, how successful it is at reaching that audience — possibly to the exclusion of others — should absolutely form part of its evaluation.

Anyway. I've waffled on enough. It's nearly 1am. I should sleep. Farewell for now.

1261: Registered Version

The resurrection of various video games from my youth is interesting.

I'm not talking about remakes here — though this discussion is in part prompted by the upcoming Unreal Engine 3-powered remake of Rise of the Triad — but instead, the rerelease of old DOS games, suitably tweaked and DOSboxed up in order to make them work properly on modern machines.

An awful lot of these games that are being resurrected were once "shareware" titles. For those of you too young to remember the shareware model — I'm not even sure it's still around these days — it was a means of distributing usually independently-developed games that involved giving away a significant proportion of a finished product for free, then inviting people to cough up for a more fully-featured "registered version" if they liked it.

The distinguishing factor between a shareware version and a good old-fashioned demo was the fact that demos are usually crippled or limited in some way; shareware versions, meanwhile, are fully-functional, just not quite as fully-functional as the registered version.

I didn't explain that very well. Let me give you a practical example that might make it a bit clearer.

Let's take the PC game Rise of the Triad, since it was that that got me thinking about this today. Rise of the Triad's shareware version was subtitled The HUNT Begins and featured ten levels in which you could only play one of the different characters available in the full version. These ten levels did not appear anywhere in the registered version, which was known as Dark War. This meant that you could play through the shareware version, decide you liked the game, buy the "full" version and play through a completely new series of levels.

This was one approach to the shareware model. Other games, such as Rise of the Triad's spiritual predecessor Wolfenstein 3D, were split into discrete "episodes", with the shareware version consisting of only the first episode and usually not featuring all the enemies, weapons and graphics from the full version.

The reason I'm thinking about this today is because when I was young and playing shareware versions of these games that I got from various magazine cover CDs and downloaded from CompuServe (yeah, you heard me), attaining the registered version appeared to be something that was all but impossible to me as a teenager with no credit or debit card. Digital distribution of paid-for titles was unheard for, so there was no "just download it from Steam", and many shareware titles required you to order the registered versions from America, leading to exorbitant shipping costs.

As such, I didn't really get to play many registered versions of shareware games I remember rather fondly until much, much later. It's a lot of fun to be able to revisit these games so quickly and easily these days and discover that the registered versions were indeed rather fun, after all.

Do they still hold up as decent games after all this time, though? Your mileage may vary somewhat, but I certainly still have a soft spot for things like Rise of the Triad, and am very much looking forward to seeing what Interceptor Entertainment have made of the upcoming reboot, which I preordered today. (It's $15, and you get four old Apogee titles for free when you preorder, including the original Rise of the Triad, its expansion and the two Blake Stone games. Not a bad deal at all.)

1260: Which Way?

To be perfectly frank with you, dear reader, I sometimes feel like I'm running out of things to write about on this 'ere blog.

It's not true at all, of course — there's always something to write about, however niche interest it might be. But on more than one occasion I've sat down to write and wondered if it was really worth talking about the thing I feel like talking about. My usual response to this particular mental block is just to say "fuck it" and write it anyway, with the usual disclaimer that anything I write here is my own personal opinion and does not reflect the opinions of etc. etc. you know the drill from a million and one Twitter bios.

I do sometimes question why I'm still writing this. This is the 1,260th day since I started writing something on this blog every single day, and my reasons for writing have changed considerably over that time.

Actually, I'm not sure that's entirely true; my reasons for writing here have always been nothing more noble than "for personal satisfaction" and "to have something interesting to do". My feelings towards the things I'm writing have obviously changed in parallel with my life situation at various times, however: when I first started blogging daily, I was still working in teaching and having a thoroughly miserable time; this then proceeded through my 2010 trip to PAX East, a mini-vacation that I maintain is one of the most carefree, happy times I've ever experienced; through the breakup of my marriage; the general collapse of my life as a whole and the subsequent rebuilding thereof.

I find it quite interesting to look back every so often and see the course my life has taken, whether that's through manually navigating to fondly-remembered posts — yes, even with 1,260 daily posts, I still have specific favourites and can usually navigate to them fairly quickly — or clicking the "Random Post" button at the top of the screen.

One thing I have found is that I was at my most creative when I was at my most miserable. I won't lie to you, dear reader, I most certainly haven't shaken off the Black Dog of depression by any means, but I'm a lot better than the emotional wreck I was during the downfall of my marriage. But while I have absolutely no desire to return to those dark days, I do find it intriguing that I found it a lot easier to come up with creative, funny, off-the-wall posts when I was suffering. Perhaps it was a defence mechanism: putting up a barrier around the pain I was feeling in an attempt to not "bring down" everyone around me; perhaps it was just a way of attempting to make myself feel better. I don't know. Whatever it was, I miss it in a perverse sort of way; the flashes of inspiration I had in those days don't come quite as often as they once did.

Said flashes of inspiration were three years ago, though, so it's entirely possible that I'm just older and wiser(?) or, at the very least, just older. I don't really feel that different, though; perhaps it's a subtle thing. The evidence is there, after all.

Anyway, I've pontificated for long enough about nothing at all, but at least it's given me an entry for today. I am tired now. I think it is time to go to sleep. Good night!

1259: Gross

My year and a bit reviewing social and mobile games was enough to make me never, ever want to play one of them ever again, but I feel it is worth educating people on the things that these games are doing — seriously unpleasant things.

I'll preface this with the caveat that not all social and mobile games do these things. But a huge majority of them do. And you should be aware of it, if you're not already.

First thing to do is read this.

If you read that, I probably don't actually need to say any more. But I will anyway.

"Coercive monetization." Sounds horrible, doesn't it? Well, it is; it's the practice of convincing players that they "need" to spend money, and that it's their "choice" to spend money. It's underhanded trickery, in other words, and it's massively commonplace in the free-to-play sector — but particularly in the realms of mobile and social games.

That post's author Ramin Shokrizade describes the use of coercive monetization techniques in relation to "fun pain" — a term coined by Roger Dickey from Zynga to describe games that actively put obstacles in the way of the player's fun. These could be any of a wide variety of things — an energy system telling them they can't play any more; a timer saying they can't use this building/hero/object until it's been readied/built; an object which is just slightly too expensive, and which is all but necessary to progress. All of these things are used in order to get the player making that all-important first payment — to "convert" them from a freeloading bastard (albeit one with some common sense) into a person blindly willing to continue paying into an obviously manipulative business model while under the illusion of having "fun".

Shokrizade cites one of my least favourite games ever in his piece — King's Candy Crush Saga. This game is immensely popular, yet is 1) a Bejeweled ripoff and 2) one of the most manipulative, exploitative, outright unpleasant games I have ever encountered.

It begins innocently enough. You're given levels that are pretty straightforward to complete, and you'll make good progress through them. Gradually, they'll get more difficult, but not noticeably so — not until you reach an artificial barrier on the game map that requires you to either spam your friends with requests or pay real money to progress. Since to many people, spamming one's friends with Facebook requests is becoming something of a taboo, many choose to pay the $1 fee to progress — but in doing so they break that seal and "convert" themselves into a paying player.

King knows this, and thus makes the levels after this barrier noticeably more difficult. But it doesn't do this in a fair way; as with Bejeweled (and particularly its free-to-play social counterpart Bejeweled Blitz) Candy Crush Saga is primarily based on luck rather than skill — you can't plan ahead because you don't know what's going to fall from the top of the screen, so more often than not running out of moves is unavoidable. What Candy Crush Saga does as it progresses is weight the behind-the-scenes random number generators significantly against the player so it will be very difficult for them to progress without paying up for boosts, or extra lives, or permanent upgrades, many of which are extremely expensive.

You may feel that there's no harm in this, and indeed some people make it a badge of personal pride to play through something like Candy Crush Saga without paying a penny. But in the process, they're having a frustrating, boring experience. Why would you deliberately do that to yourself, when you can pay, say, $1 for the iOS version of Bejeweled and have literally infinitely more fun than with Candy Crush Saga?

These manipulative business models are not harmless, nor are they worthy of praise, regardless of how many millions of dollars they're bringing in every day. They're making money from conning gullible idiots — and while some of you may argue that people with no common sense need to be woken up a bit, it's not really fair to take advantage of people in this manner, particularly when many of them are children.

I find the whole practice utterly reprehensible, and I can't help hoping that the whole bubble on free-to-play social and mobile games bursts very soon. Unfortunately, with the amount of money many of the more popular titles are making every day — and the sheer number of the bastard things that are released each day — I don't see that happening any time soon, making mobile gaming in particular all but a lost cause for me these days.

Do yourself a favour: if you're currently playing something like Candy Crush Saga or its ilk, stop. You're being manipulated. Find a low-cost game with the same mechanics, pay for it, then play it as much as you want. This is the way it's always been in the past, and I long to go back to a time where that is the only model.

"Coercive monetization" is gross. It is borderline unethical. So don't support it.

1258: Crossing Over

After a bit of time playing Animal Crossing, I think I sort of "get it" now.

Well, as much as it is possible to "get it", anyway.

See, the thing with Animal Crossing is that it is precisely what you make of it. If you want to play it as a financial management sim and try to get all the upgrades to your house as quickly as possible, you can do that. If you want to play it as a collectathon game, attempting to fill the in-game encylopaedia and museum as well as your virtual house with everything the game has to offer, you can. If you simply want to play it as a means of chilling out for a bit without any pressure… well, you can do that, too.

The nice thing is that it doesn't railroad you into any of these activities. It encourages you to try things for yourself and see what you enjoy. There's no obligation to keep doing the same thing over and over again — though you'll find that there are certain things that are more enjoyable or profitable to do more often than others. The game also keeps introducing things at a good pace as you play, too — new characters, new shops, new gameplay options — and continues doing so months and months after you started playing. It really is quite impressive how much content there is packed into a game that is ostensibly about nothing at all.

One of the things I never really explored in my last encounter with the series on the DS was the multiplayer stuff, and I believe that the 3DS version adds a considerable amount more depth to the multiplayer — i.e. you can actually see each other, wander around together and interact with one another. This is surprisingly entertaining, though it's a little frustrating that some game mechanics simply "switch off" when other players are visiting, leaving you unable to take advantage of them.

I played for a bit with Andie earlier, and it was great fun. We wandered around her town together, then took a boat trip over to her town's tropical island, and played some of the "Tour" minigames, in which you cooperate with one another to achieve various tasks — catch a certain number of bugs, retrieve and reassemble fossils, fish a certain number of fish. The nice thing about these games is that they encourage you to work together to a certain degree, but also provide a mild competitive element in that whoever "worked harder" gets a slightly larger reward at the end of the game. It's not a massive extra reward, no, but it's enough to put a nice competitive spin on things and keep them interesting.

I'm certainly enjoying it now — for a while after starting to play I was wondering if I was actually enjoying myself when I was playing, but I'm well and truly into the groove now. I'm interested to see how my little town develops over time, and how the game grows, changes and evolves — and the nice thing is, because so many other people are playing the game at present, it's possible to share all this fun with other people. It's a social game in the very truest sense, and one that encourages people to laugh, play and enjoy themselves together, rather than simply to spam each other with facile Facebook wall posts.

Good job, Nintendo.

1257: You Ess Gee

I'm really happy with the way USgamer is going.

Lest you've somehow missed me going on about it, USgamer is my new job. It is the American counterpart to the well-established European gaming site Eurogamer, but it is absolutely not a reskinned Eurogamer. It is its own beast, and the small team we have working on it are carving out a great little niche.

In order for a new gaming site to make sense in this crowded content marketplace, it needs to offer something different and interesting. There are already far too many sites doing the "daily news, occasional previews and reviews" thing, and after a while they become all but interchangeable. That's not to say that there's anything inherently wrong with that model, but there are already a whole bunch of well-established sites out there that do that, and so jumping head-first into the fray and hoping to compete is, frankly, lunacy.

Instead, what we're doing with USgamer is a combination of original reporting and personal, opinionated editorial pieces. The news that has already been covered by other sites gets put into our front-page "feed", allowing us to acknowledge that things have happened but not waste any time on rewriting things that have already been written five or six times over — and will be rewritten several hundred more times by the time the day is over. This frees us up to write interesting features, interviews, reviews, previews and opinion pieces, with a strong focus on us writing in our own personal "voices" in order to provoke discussion. It's the kind of site I'd like to read if I weren't actively writing for it; in fact, I still read the stuff my colleagues write and comment on it, and we're building a very pleasant little community in the process.

This is the first time I've really been present at the birth of a website like this. I was around when my brother launched the now-defunct What They Play, but in a freelance capacity rather than as a regular staffer, so I didn't really get to see in detail how the community built up and responded to things. With USgamer, however, it's interesting to observe the new community members showing up, tentatively commenting, engaging in discussions and subsequently growing in confidence, becoming regular posters in the process.

It's early days yet — our most commented-on piece has about 30 comments or so, which is a fraction of what a fairly throwaway story on Eurogamer attracts on a daily basis — but we're setting a good groundwork. By having high-quality stuff on the site at this early stage and actively participating in discussions with the community, we're setting high expectations both for ourselves and our readers, and I really think that's going to pay off in the long term. We're never going to be a Kotaku, but we're not trying to be; Kotaku posts far too much stuff to keep up with in a single day anyway.

Basically, I'm having a blast with it so far, and I hope you like it too. On the off-chance you haven't taken a peek just yet, get thee hence, even if you're not an American. You might just like what you see.

1256: V for Victory

Been playing a bit more Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory this evening. While the newest game is, as I mentioned a few days ago, more of an evolution from mk2 than the revolution that mk2 was over the original, I'm starting to notice some more pronounced differences — differences that make it abundantly clear Idea Factory and Compile Heart are both receptive to feedback and keen to iterate on their past work in order to make things better in subsequent installments.

Let's take Victory's battle system as an example. At first glance, it appears almost identical to mk2's mechanics. On a single character's turn, they can move within a set radius according to their Move stat (which tends to be improved from its per-character baseline value via equipment rather than increased through levelling up) and, if they can reach an enemy, they may attack it. Different weapons have different "threat" areas, meaning that some are designed for focusing on a single enemy, while others have long areas that can attack enemies in a line; others can "sweep" in a wide arc in front of the character. Usually, you can position yourself in such a way that it's possible to hit two or more enemies at once for the most efficient combat. There are three different "types" of attack — Rush attacks hit more times, Power attacks are stronger (and often magical) and Break attacks have a stronger effect on the enemy's "Guard Points" bar, which, when depleted, causes them to take more damage.

In these respects, the two battle systems are identical. But from hereon, they diverge somewhat. Today I am going to talk in detail about how they are different from one another. A good proportion of you will not find this in the slightest bit interesting, and I make absolutely no apologies whatsoever for that. I'm going to talk about it anyway.

In mk2, the amount of attacks a single character could perform in a turn was determined by their "AP" (Ability Points) value. Each attack they performed cost a set number of ability points to perform, and the character could continue attacking until they had run out. Alternatively, it was also possible to finish the combo early and "bank" some AP for the following turn — in order to perform some of the special moves, this was necessary, as the AP cost was more than the character's baseline maximum AP in many cases. If a combo spent over a particular number of AP in a single turn, an "EX" move became possible, which tended to be more powerful, hit more times or have some sort of special effect.

In Victory, meanwhile, the AP system has been removed entirely, and each character's combo in a turn may only ever consist of up to four moves. (At least, this is true at the early stage I'm at, anyway.) The big difference comes in how you assign the Rush, Power and Break moves to each character; rather than being able to assign any unlocked moves at will and being able to perform them if you had enough AP, Victory gives each move a "CP" (Combo Points) cost, and each character an allowance of CP that gradually increases as they level up. Early in the game, there are not enough CP available to fill all possible slots in the command list, meaning that you're forced to think a bit more carefully about each character's strengths and weaknesses when prioritising which moves they should have available.

This is a very simple and straightforward change to mk2's system, but it works incredibly well. While I enjoyed fighting in mk2, there was relatively little to differentiate between a lot of the different characters, special moves aside. In Victory, meanwhile, it becomes possible (and indeed necessary) to specialise characters in each of the three types of attack, then make them work as a team to take down enemies. For example, my current party contains Plutia, who is weak at physical attacks (particularly Rushes) but has some strong elemental-infused Power attacks and is also very good at Break attacks; Neptune, who is a fairly well-rounded character I have focusing on Rush attacks; and Noire, who I have using some strong Power attacks.

With this configuration, I can have Plutia run in and wear down the enemy's guard, then Neptune and Noire can step in for the kill. Noire does more damage with her power attacks; Neptune's Rush attacks cause the "EX meter" to rise quicker. When said meter reaches particular boundaries, strong "EX Finisher" moves become available, allowing for slightly longer combos with special effects at the end. Later in the game, the EX meter can also be used to unleash extremely powerful special attacks, though doing so depletes it, unlike the Finisher moves.

Another big change comes in the SP (Skill Point) system. In mk2, SP, which were used to cast spells and/or allow the characters to transform into their more powerful "Hard Drive Divinity" forms, gradually charged up as the characters took and received damage. In Victory, they start a dungeon expedition with a full bar, which gradually depletes as special abilities are used. In this sense, it's more like a traditional bank of magic points, which is arguably a little less creative but works somewhat better. The SP system of mk2 nerfed the Hard Drive Divinity feature significantly in that it was often only possible to remain transformed for a turn or two at a time, which didn't seem quite in keeping with the supposedly awesome power of these "CPU" goddesses. In Victory, meanwhile, you can transform at the start of a fight and remain comfortably in HDD for quite some time — what you have to take into account here instead is managing your stock of SP over the course of the whole dungeon, rather than within the individual fight.

These few changes to Victory's battle system help make a game that initially seems rather similar actually quite distinct from its predecessor, which is very much a good thing. The enemies have been buffed up somewhat, too, meaning that you have to work quite hard to defeat some of them, and many of them are more than capable of giving you a good smack in the face in return. I don't remember getting a Game Over more than once or twice over the course of mk2; less than 10 hours into Victory and I've already had 4 or 5, and all of them have been my own stupid fault rather than the game being cheap. This is a good sign — while piss-easy combat has its appeal, it's nice to have a bit of challenge now and then.

Anyway. Suffice to say I am enjoying Victory so far and have little doubt that I will spend an obscene amount of time on seeing everything it has to offer in the long term. I am, however, a bit put out that my favourite character IF doesn't seem to be in this one very much! Oh well. You can't have everything, and Plutia is kind of adorable in a dopey sort of way. Also, Noire still makes me weak at the knees. "I-it's not like I'm lonely or anything…!"